Drag n’ Drop – Tyler Beauman

DRAG N' DROP STORY

BY TYLER BEAUMAN

Drag N Drop Story is a fun, hands-on, story-creating, learning tool for kids. Using colors, puzzle pieces and animations, children create their own stories, learning parts of speech as they go. It has always been difficult for teachers to incorporate hands-on learning activities when teaching English, this is one of the reasons I never enjoyed the subject and did poorly compared to classes such as Science and Math. My goal is to cement sentence structure into the users’ minds through associations and excitement.

Originally, the system worked by supplying kids with puzzle pieces that had a different word written on each one. The pieces were colored to represent different parts of speech and would only fit together to form correctly written sentences. These pieces would also have RFID tags on the bottom that would be scanned into the computer by the user, causing a little animation to play depicting the sentence.

After my One-on-One talk, my project has shifted slightly. Instead of focusing on sentence structure, I will now be focusing on Story telling. Words will still be colored to show different parts of speech, but pieces will no longer contain one word each. Pieces will now contain interchangeable story chunks such as characters, actions, and settings. Animations will also still be shown.

The biggest challenge facing me today is getting the mechanics to work. I’ve spent too much time trying to tweak my code to make GIFs work and now it’s a mess. It will take time to pick out the important, usable code.